Inside-Out courses have been suspended for the duration of the State-mandated social distancing due to the pandemic. When we are allowed to return to work inside, we will as soon as possible.
Until that time, we are offering a limited number of reading/correspondence classes at OSP and OSCI. While we wish we were able to do more, we are glad to be able to continue offering these venues for people to move forward with their studies.
Past Inside-Out class information: spring 2020 Inside-Out COURSE OFFERINGS
GEOG 444 / cultural geography / professor shaul cohen
How do we understand the concept of “culture”? What factors contribute to cultural difference, what does that mean in the world, and why is it important? This course approaches culture as a set of evolving and overlapping processes, rather than as something that is fixed in time and place. It will explore the power relations that are part of cultural, and affect people based on who they are (or who they are told that they are) and where they are. Cultural Geography gives us tools to examine the ways culture is produced and practiced in different communities, societies, and scales. The class will draw upon a wide range of readings and experiences, and students will engage in dialogue about the worlds they live in, the cultures they are part of, and the ways that they interact with power and place.
Classes will be held on Monday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem. Applications are due Friday 2/21 by 5pm and must be emailed to insideout@uoregon.edu.
Honors college: HC 421H / ethics, religion, & literature: Tolstoy’s resurrection / professor steven shankman
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest and most influential masters of the novel. The Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, including the novels of Tolstoy, made a profound impression on Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), perhaps the greatest philosopher of ethics of our era. We will carefully read Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection (1899), paying special attention to what the novel has to say about the relation between ethics, religion, and literature. In this novel, Tolstoy breaks with a notion of art that, he had come to believe, was too narrowly addressed - like his great earlier novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina – to members of his own elite social class. Alongside Resurrection, we will read Levinas’s challenging late essay “God and Philosophy” which, like Tolstoy’s novel, radically reimagines the relation between ethics and religion by “thinking God,” as Levinas puts it, on the basis of – or starting out from – ethical obligation (penser Dieu à partir de l’éthique).
This course is only open to Honors College students.
Classes will be held Tuesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (4:00 - 10:00 including travel time) at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Applications are due by 5pm on Friday, February 14th and should be emailed to insideout@uoregon.edu and shankman@uoregon.edu.
Info session: Thursday, February 6th at 4pm in 193 Anstett Hall.
IRES 452/552 / Race & Ethnicity and the law / professor michael hames-garcia
This class will focus on forms of social control in the United States, with a primary focus on race and urban policing. We will consider developments such as community policing and big data policing in cities like New York and Chicago and the history of policing in Baltimore and Los Angeles. We will also look at the role of policing internationally, at the U.S. border, and in colonial spaces like Puerto Rico. Of particular interest will be the relationships between policing agencies and communities of color. This course has a seminar format, relying on student-centered discussion with minimal use of lectures by the professor.
It satisfies an upper-division ES elective requirement for Ethnic Studies majors and minors; General Social Science major with a focus in Crime, Law, and Society; campus partner elective for the Legal Studies minor; and UO’s core education requirements as a US: Difference, Inequality, Agency course.
Classes will be held on Wednesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Applications are due Sunday 2/16 by 5pm and must be emailed to insideout@uoregon.edu and mhamesg@uoregon.edu.
Current winter 2020 Inside-Out COURSE OFFERINGS
CAS 407 / autobiography as political agency / professor anita chari
This class explores the autobiography as a form of both personal and political expression. The class begins by complicating, questioning and demystifying the divide between the personal and political by linking students' personal stories and histories with narratives of broader social structures, such as capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.
We will read autobiographies from diverse sources, including diaries, quasi-fictionalized autobiographies, poetry, and autobiographies of political activists. We will also engage with theories of social structure and agency in order to interrogate the interface between personal experience and political agency. Finally, we delve into trans-generational narratives in order to think about social structure and agency across time and space.
Students will produce a significant body of writing in class and in homework assignments in order to create their own (political) autobiographies. Authors that we will read in the class include the following: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, Gloria Anzaldua, Anne Frank, Hannah Arendt, Iris Young, Walter Benjamin, Nellie Wong, Kitty Tsui, Aime Cesaire, and Nelson Mandela.
Classes will be held on Tuesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institute in Salem. Applications deadline has EXTENDED and they are now due Friday 11/15 by midnight and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and anitac@uoregon.edu.
Info Session: Tuesday 11/05/19 @ 6:30pm in 191 Anstett
Interviews will be held on Tuesday, November 19 from 5-7pm.
Honors college: HC 434/431H / Water, climate, and environmental justice / professor mark carey
How are environmental issues -- and particularly water issues related to climate change -- experienced, understood, studied, and managed in different ways depending on race, class, and gender? How are environmental impacts unevenly distributed? Who produces the knowledge to grapple with climate change and water stresses -- and who doesn't? Who gets to decide (and who is left out) of the solutions to climate change and water security? And what can we learn more broadly about issues of race, class, and gender when we study climate and water in particular? These are the kinds of questions this course will tackle. At the broadest level, it is a course in environmental justice and specifically climate justice. We will focus on water-related topics, and water in many different forms -- from urban water contamination and sea level rise to glacier floods and water for farming and food. We will address these issues in the United States and internationally. While the course will examine theoretical and technical aspects of climate and water, the justice focus asks us to think also about ethics, morality, fairness and equity, and how inequality plays out within particular societies, globally, historically, and for future generations. Ultimately, this helps us reflect more profoundly on how we -- and others -- interact with and influence not only our planet but also each other.
This course is only open to Honors College students.
Classes will be held Wednesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (4:00 - 10:00 including travel time) at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, November 13th and should be emailed to insideout@uoregon.edu and carey@uoregon.edu.
Info session: Tuesday, November 12 at 5pm in 191 Anstett Hall.
PPPM 407 / tough on crime or smart on crime: american juvenile justice policy in the 21st century / professor kevin alltucker
Join us for an exploration of the American Juvenile Justice system from its beginnings in the early 19th century, to its contemporary form today. We will examine the social, political, economic, gender and racial perspectives that have influenced juvenile justice policy throughout its history, and continue to shape policy today. The concept of “parens patriae” (the state as parent) was the fundamental ideology that guided the origins of the juvenile justice system, but recent Supreme Court cases, as well as contemporary brain research are challenging old norms. Researchers and Think Tank progressives are suggesting the juvenile justice system should be drastically changed in order to improve the outcomes for youth involved in the system, and we will end the course by looking at current reform efforts.
Classes will be held on Monday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Applications are due on Saturday, November 9 and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and kalltuck@uoregon.edu .
Info Session: Tuesday 11/05/19 @ 6:30pm in 191 Anstett / Interviews will be held during Week 8 of Fall 2019.
SOC 410 / Race, Gender and Poverty in the United States / Professor Ellen scott
In this course, we will consider the intersections of race, gender and class and how they are experienced in, and how they shape institutions, such as the labor market, social welfare system, schools, and the criminal justice system, for example. We will read ethnographies to examine the politics of race, class and gender in the United States.
The class will be entirely discussion-based. We will conclude by employing the concepts from the course to examine our own lives through the lens of the institutional structures studied (work/economy, education, family and friendship networks, criminal justice system). This will constitute the core of the final essay for the course.
Classes will be held on Wednesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institute in Salem. Applications are due by 5pm on Friday, November 8 and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and escott@uoregon.edu .
Info Session: Tuesday 11/05/19 @ 6:30pm in 191 Anstett / Interviews will be held during Week 7 of Fall 2019.
PAST COURSE OFFERINGS
Fall 2019
CAS 407 / Prisoner Narratives and Social Movements / Instructor katie dwyer
This course explores social change and conflict resolution through the lens of autobiography by incarcerated individuals whose stories and experiences influenced social movements and conflict situations. We will focus on three case studies: the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the US during the Civil Rights era and today.
All interested students must complete an application and an interview with the instructor. Classes are held at the Oregon State Correctional Institution with an equal number of UO and incarcerated students. Students must agree to abide by the rules and policies of the Department of Corrections and the rules of Inside-Out and the UO's Prison Education Program. These rules will be discussed at length in a pre-class meeting. Holding classes in a prison offers unique opportunities for depth of discussion and diversity of experiences, and also is a complex emotional space.
Classes will be held on Wednesdays from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institution. Applications must be emailed to kdwyer6@uoregon.edu and insideout@uoregon.edu.
Fall 2019
CRES 410 / Restorative justice / Prof. nathaline frener
Join us for a critical and engaging discussion about the principles and practices of Restorative Justice. Through course dialogues and activities we will explore the needs and roles of victims, offenders, communities, and justice systems, as well as outline the principles and values of Restorative Justice. Assumptions about—and labels given to—all those involved will be examined.
Using the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program model, this course will include both “inside”(students inside OSP) and “outside” students (students at UO). This course will take place at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
This is a transformative learning experience that emphasizes collaboration and dialogue, while inviting students to address crime, justice, and other issues of social concern.
Classes will be held on an evening to be determined from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary. Applications are due by 4pm on Wednesday, May 8 and must be delivered in print to the Conflict & Dispute Resolution Program, Suite 137, UO Law School
Interviews will be held on Wednesday, May 15. Email questions to nfrener@uoregon.edu.
Spring 2019
HC 421H / Religion, Ethics AND Literature: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina / Prof. STEven Shankman
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest and most influential masters of the novel. The Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, including the novels of Tolstoy, made a profound impression on Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), perhaps the greatest modern philosopher of the centrality of ethical obligation to what it means to be human. We will carefully read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, paying special attention to what the novel has to say about ethics understood in Levinas’s sense: my inescapable responsibility for a unique and irreplaceable other. We will read Ethics and Infinity, a reasonably accessible and brief series of interviews with Levinas, and we will look for connections between Tolstoy’s fiction and Levinas’s thought. We will consider how Anna’s otherness is sacrificed, in Tolstoy’s novel, to a notion of religion that is divorced from ethics, a notion of religion that Emmanuel Levinas labels as “primitive”: “Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation,” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (79), "represents not the superior, but rather the forever primitive, form of religion.” Anna's husband Karenin’s dogmatic – and, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time “primitive” - understanding of Christianity makes it impossible for him to hear Anna’s voice, to see her face, to register her otherness, her alterity. Tolstoy’s critique of conventional religion as a silencing of lost voices is sounded again and again throughout the remainder of his career as a writer and thinker.
This is an Inside-Out class: half the students (“inside” students) will be those who live inside OSCI and the other half (“outside” students) will be from UO’s main campus.
Classes will be held on Tuesday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institute. Applications are due by 5pm on Friday, February 15 and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and shankman@uoregon.edu .
An information session will be held at 4pm on Thursday, February 7 in Chapman Hall 101. Interviews will be held during Week 7 of Winter 2019.
Spring 2019
HC 444H/431H / Geography and American Folk, From Angelou to Springsteen / Prof. SHAUL COHEN
How do we know who we are? Identity is a story that we tell ourselves, and that is told to us, and about us, and is made up of many strands that continue to unfold in and around us. In this course we will draw upon elements of popular and folk cultures to examine some of the stories that contribute to American identities. Our materials will range from traditional sources such as “classic” literature to the immediacy of graffiti, and we will bring as many voices into conversation as we can.
The course will be inside a prison, thus access to some types of media will be restricted, but our class will be far more diverse than a campus class in many ways. This will give us an opportunity to consider issues such as authenticity, authority, inclusion, and exclusion, as we try to discern the processes and forces at work in the “construction” of the American sense of self (selves).
In keeping with the pedagogy of Inside-Out, our time in the prison will be devoted primarily to dialogue and exploration, and we will draw upon academic readings and song, poetry, film and television, art, architecture, religion, politics, landscape, food, and on our accumulated impressions about this country and its many facets and communities. Each participant in the course will be expected to draw upon their own experiences to inform our conversations.
This is an Inside-Out class: half the students (“inside” students) will be those who live inside OSCI and the other half (“outside” students) will be from UO’s main campus.
Classes will be held on Monday evenings from 6-8:50pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary. The class is an Honors College class, available to honor students. Applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, February 20 and must be emailed to insideout@uoregon.edu and scohen@uoregon.edu .
An information session will be held at 6pm on Monday, February 11 in Condon Hall 206. Interviews will be held on Friday, February 22 from 2:00-5:00pm.
WINTER 2019
PPPM 407 / Building Community with Fundraising and Grant Making: The Power of Philanthropy From Disenfranchised Communities / Prof. Kevin Alltucker
Join us for a critical exploration of the restorative characteristics of creating community through fundraising and grant making, from the perspectives of historically marginalized populations. While there has always been a strong thread of socially responsible philanthropy in the U.S., recent critics have urged more attention paid to equity and inclusion, and to the restorative qualities that result when marginalized populations conduct philanthropy themselves. This class is groundbreaking in that it combines several bodies of literature in a new way that will certainly be interesting, educationally challenging, and perhaps life- changing.
Using the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program model, this course will include both student living inside OSCI ("inside" students), and students from the University of Oregon ("outside" students). This course will take place inside the OSCI in Salem. Inside and outside student will study alongside one another.
This is a transformative learning experience that emphasizes collaboration and dialogue, and invites students to consider the differential effects of America's system of philanthropy, and how to create new forms of sustainable philanthropy.
Classes will be held on Wednesday evenings from 6-8:30pm (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institute. Applications are due by 8pm, November 12 and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and kalltuck@uoregon.edu .
Interviews will be held on Tues 11/13, 8:30-10p in the EMU 230 Swindells Room and Thurs (11/15) 7:30p – 9:30p in Peterson 107.
Fall 2018
CAS 407 / COMMUNICATION IN CONFLICT AND ACROSS CULTURES / INSTRUCTOR KATIE DWYER
This course will explore concepts in intercultural understanding as well as building skills in conflict resolution, cross-cultural work, coalition building, and individual self-reflection. We will examine both the broad frameworks for discussing cultural differences as well as thinking through the ways identity and context influence our experience of the world and our encounters with one another. Conflict resolution theories and skills will be a major focus. We will also discuss intercultural encounters in a variety of specific contexts, including education, the workplace, and in medical care. We will ground these concepts in our own experiences, and include real-world applications in our own lives. To get to the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem we will leave campus at 4:00 in the afternoon, returning by 10:00.
Classes will be held on Wednesday evenings from 6-8:30p (not including travel time) at Oregon State Correctional Institute. Applications are due by 5pm, August 28 and must be emailed to the insideout@uoregon.edu and kdwyer6@uoregon.edu .
FALL 2018
CRES / RESTORATIVE JUSTICE / PROF. NATHALINE FRENER
Join us for a critical and engaging discussion about the principles and practices of Restorative Justice. Through course dialogues and activities we will explore the needs and roles of victims, offenders, communities, and justice systems, as well as outline the principles and values of Restorative Justice. Assumptions about—and labels given to—all those involved will be examined.
Using the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program model, this course will include both “inside”(students inside OSP) and “outside” students(students at UO). This course will take place at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. This is a transformative learning experience that
emphasizes collaboration and dialogue, while inviting students to address crime, justice, and other issues of social concern.
Classes will be held from 6-8:30p (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary. Date is TBD. Applications are due by 5pm on Thursday, May 10 and must be delivered to the office of the Conflict & Dispute Resolution Program, Suite 137, at the UO Law School. Interviews will be held on Wednesday, May 23.
Spring 2018
GEOG 410 / NATIONALISM & ETHNICITY / PROF. SHAUL COHEN
The modern political system organizes the world into countries, and countries are often identified as belonging to nations. Nationalism is an expression of belonging to a state, it roughly defines the land, people, and institutions that constitute the members of the state, according to that state. Ethnicity is an organizing mechanism that operates somewhat differently. It too is an expression of belonging, and is composed of elements of culture, history, and identity that make its members distinct, but ethnicity is a cultural force that usually operates at a scale smaller than a state, and an ethnic group can exist in multiple states simultaneously, and within a state with other ethnic groups. This course will address the powerful human constructs of nationalism and ethnicity, and examine the dynamics that mark societies that are made up of more than one ethnic group, as well as the increasingly rare parts of the world in which there are more monolithic societies. It will focus on the tensions that individuals, families, communities, cultures, and countries experience when national and ethnicity are in tension. Significant attention will be given to the experience(s) of the United States, and additional cases from around the world will be introduced. Through readings, exercises, writing, and dialogue, students will learn about the some of the effects of nationalism and ethnicity in our own lives, and the lives of those around us.
The course is based in the discipline of geography and will draw upon insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other fields as well. Class time is spent in dialogue and group exercises; there are no tests, but there is a writing assignment each week. Half of the class members will be from campus, the other half from the prison. The class will meet on Monday evenings, with mandatory attendance required through finals week. To get to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem we will leave campus at 4:00 in the afternoon, returning by 10:00.
Classes will be held on Monday evenings from 6-8:30p (not including travel time) at Oregon State Penitentiary. Applications are due by 5p on Monday, February 19 and can be submitted by email to insideout@uoregon.edu. Interviews will be held on Friday, February 23.